Re: Porting gdk to curses

[Kenneth Albanowski <kjahds kjahds com>]

On Thu, 21 Jan 1999, Pavel Machek wrote:

> Porting gdk to curses is the hard one. Even here, I've got something
> working, but I still can not see how hard task is going to be. (I'm in
> state where testgtk's main screen somehow prints, with few buttons
> over each other and with arrow keys moving right - if you only touch
> visible parts).

I have to admit that I agree with Owen: this doesn't sound like it is
going to be useful or sound in the long run.  Character-based GUIs have
considerably different requirements from pixel-addressable GUIs, and any
translation layer is probably going to have a lot more heuristics then is
safe. Some stuff can be faked quite easily, but try displaying a _compact_
and useful button or scroll bar using the normal Gtk widgets.  Colors
don't even begin to translate in a useful fashion. 

The appropriate approach, IMO, is to put together something like Gdk, but
for character mode (Cgdk?), and then port Gtk to the Cgdk platform,
redesiging the widgets as necessary. 

> PS: Last question: Is there some better replacement for curses? Curses
> are really cursed library, which likes to segfault at first sign of
> error. ALso text-mode windowing library would be good, and only one I
> know of (panels) is really strange beast :-(.

Some people swear by (or with?) slang.

-- 
Kenneth Albanowski (kjahds@kjahds.com, CIS: 70705,126)